Predictable Prospecting
Interview: Marylou Tyler and Joseph Dager - Predictable Prospecting and Cold Calling Process
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Episode Highlights:
- Mary Lou Tyler’s background and career path
- How to best use Predictable Prospecting
- Cold calling, personas, and outbound marketing
- Why do salespeople resist the cold calling process?
- Other methods of prospecting
- Leaving voicemails
- Getting past the gatekeeper
- After the sale: Reselling, renewing, and getting referrals
- Warming up the chill: Software recommendations
- How important is a process to a company?
Resources: Joseph Dager and Business 901 Yesware Outreach.io Toutapp SalesLoft Follow Marylou on Twitter and connect with her on Linkedin
Episode Transcript
Joseph: Welcome everyone, this is Joseph Dager, the host to the Business901 podcast. With me today is Marylou Tyler. She is the founder of Strategic Pipeline and Outbound Sale Process Improvement Consulting Group. Marylou has an all-star client list and co-author of the book Predictable Revenue. Marylou, I’m excited about your new book, Predictable Prospecting, and maybe I can call it the promise of hope for outbound marketing. Is outbound marketing still alive?Marylou: Yes it is, alive and well and kicking. Joseph: Oh great. You mentioned that you’re in Iowa. I keep thinking about here’s this sass girl with this experience and everything. How did a girl like you end up in Iowa? How’d you get there? Marylou: Well, you know, it’s marrying your college sweetheart who’s a Californian, we’re all Californians but my husband had an opportunity to do a five-year project here, it was something that he wanted to sink his teeth into, so to speak, so we packed up the family and moved from San Francisco which is our home base to the middle of the country, to Iowa. Joseph: Wow. Tell me a little bit about your background. What are you doing in California? Marylou: I grew up through the ranks of computer science. I’m an engineer, I graduated with computer science and electrical engineering degree back in 1981 so it’s been a while and for many, many, years I worked on large systems, project management in contact centers so I installed like Bose’s 1800 Orkin’s call centers, very big, big, big call centers working on project management and I got totally interested in this whole concept of outbound lead generation and outbound appointment setting. I came up through that vertical if you will and then worked very long in putting together lead generation systems. I actually wrote, this is prior to the Internet, I wrote software for lead gen systems before they had like a Salesforce, a CRM for the health care and financial services industry. For the last 25, 30 years, that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing, is focusing on outreach outbound lead generation and now with these tools and the ability for the internet continuing in my study of lending the phone the internet and email. Joseph: I’m so amazed you’re still in business if you’re an outbound marketer, right? Marylou: Oh yeah. No, I mean there’s a lot of opportunity and it’s great. It’s a great vertical because it’s all about if you have a product or service and you want to try a new idea, the best way to do it, in my opinion, is an outreach program. Joseph: Well, that’s one of the things that I think is interesting is that I’m along with you. I kind of believe the same thing, you find a product market fit, for startups it’s really about–you gotta start somewhere. I may not–everything’s a warm lead. Marylou: Oh yeah. In my world, we have two to three additional awareness that we have to worry about versus the inbound side so I focus on mastering those two to three additional levels and that’s the outreach side of things. Joseph: I have to tell you that I enjoyed your book. It wasn’t a book that was, there’s 20,000 foot level type stuff. Marylou: Indeed. Joseph: But I have to tell you–we kind of talked about these before the podcast a little bit but I like the book, the granularity of it and specific examples, instructions and things to do, and that’s what I like about it but it’s also what I didn’t like about it because I feel like people think that sometimes you can take those, tear the page out, hand it to 10 people, and start. Can you do that and what maybe–is my feeling correct that I worry about that? Marylou: There’s truth to that. What I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been coaching and consulting is that people like to hang on and hold onto something. They want to see a system, they want to see a blueprint, they want to see visually how these all gets put together so we did that with this book. In fact, we went so far in this book to in the last chapter, we did a guide. So for those people who don’t even want to read the book and it’s entirety, go to the back pages and we put together the entire system with me trying to sell something to my co-author Jeremy Donovan who is a sales ops strategist. We wanted to set an example but our tribe, our people, our community know that our mantra is to always test. We can start them at the base line but test the results because they’re going to vary depending on who you’re selling to, what you’re selling, where’re you’re selling it, and the complexity of what you’re selling as well. Joseph: Well, I think that you put a prescription there, maybe not a prescription, a systematic way of doing it but what you say is you lay the foundation and someone can go in and just kind of lay it out on a storyboard for example and then tweak it to themselves and to their market segment and have a kind of a quick way to get the system in place. Marylou: That’s exactly right. We put together the blocks that you need to assemble a framework like this then we take you through how to actually activate it to engage your prospects and then the last section of the book talks about optimizing. The person who’s going to pick up this book and have it resonate is one that is not a. fearful of the phone or email and b. has that mindset of always be testing and trying to eek out those additional micro percentage points of improvement on response rates, on clickthrough rates, on open rates and also tracking your voicemails and your conversations so that you’re constantly working towards reducing lag in the pipeline from that initial conversation through the qualified opportunity. Joseph: Well, I think the argument you’re going to hear from anybody here before they even pick up the book, there’s this mindset nowadays, okay you express it with inbound marketers, but yeah, sure, cold calling used to be 100 phone calls, you talk to 20 people, you get five leads or something. Now, to do that you got to call 500 people, you got to talk to 10, you get one lead. Is there any truth to that and is it that much harder now? Marylou: It is harder in some ways but it’s easier in some ways because the phone is becoming more of a novelty again. If you can reach people and really focus on best time to call and again, this comes back to testing. What is the best time to call your prospects. If you focus on that and you blend and leverage technology like social and email to help you kind of warm up that chill then you’re going to have better chance of reaching the person for what’s more of a warm call than a true cold call. Joseph: But nowadays, with technology especially, we’re able to turn that whole idea of cold calling where there was this broad demographic, right? With technology, we’re able to make it sort of a warm call because we’re actually defining it before we ever pick up the phone a little bit, building that persona let’s say. Marylou: Yes. In the book, in chapter three we talked about personas. Now, you marketers and the audience, we love you because you started those persona definitions for us but we do need to extend them a bit for sales because we are also thinking about the call to action which is to get that first meeting or follow-up meeting. Your call to action is to get us the lead, our call to action is to actually engage in conversations towards qualification. We take that persona definition and we build it out so that we’ll have a rhythm of how to contact, when to contact, who to contact and what to say at the right point of contact and we’re leveraging technology for all of that. Joseph: And you also start up the book, very early in the book with a SWAT. Marylou: Yes. Joseph: But you put a special twist to it. What’s that twist? Marylou: We call it the SWAT 6. We leverage six factors. Some of you have heard some of the factors so I won’t go into the detail but we’re using the four P’s, we’re using the ability to look at our financials, how we’re marketing and advertising our products and we overlay that over the standard strength, weakness opportunity, threat matrix. What that’s doing for us is allowing more deep thought into why people should change, why now and why us so that we really understanding our value prop and we make and we want the sales people to work with us on the spot. Now, I’ve just got handed a spot 6 but actually design it themselves because they will own then the work product. We’re really big on getting the team to be actively engaged in building or assembling these building blocks of the frameworks so that they start internalizing those sales conversations. Joseph: What do you find the most resistance when it comes to let’s say cold calling or cold emailing, putting a system in place? Is it just that rejection side of it? I mean, is that where people mostly resist or do they just don’t buy into it anymore I guess? Marylou: Well, if you’re talking to sales people resisting or are you talking about prospects resisting? Joseph: I would say mostly the sales people or the salespeople I think kind of resist spending their time cold calling now, Marylou: Right. Joseph: Or the newer ones, let me put it that way there. There’s some old guys like me that pick up the phone. Marylou: Right. Well, I think there’s some issues here, we have different people at different stages of life and some people were brought up from the phone and some people are not. I find that if we can prove to them that if we’re doing this cadene and this type of rhythm, we’ll get these types of results which will get them where they want to get in terms of opportunities and commission checks.We work with each individual. The biggest problem I see out there is habit that people are not conforming to the traditional day in the life of a business developer which is more regimented than let’s say a salesperson or a farmer who’s working further into the pipeline in cultivating these opportunities into closed business. The people at the top of the funnel that I specialize in are still looking at the hard worker profile, a person who is going to come in and habitually do the work that needs to get done in order to generate the amount of meaningful conversations they need each day in order to generate those ops. Habit is a big, big one followed by skills, followed by the actual ability to sell. Joseph: We talked about prospecting. What other ways of prospecting are there besides let’s say cold email, cold calling? I mean, we can’t just get great SCO and SMO. Marylou: Right. Joseph: Maybe this is a better question, do you feel that predictable prospecting is the basis of cold calling or warm calling as we may say that is the real effort that we need to make? Marylou: I think if you’re trying to focus on the big whales, those accounts that have high probability of closing with high revenue potential or high lifetime value, then you’ve got to put in an outreach lever into your program, into your actual program for building new logos. When we’re doing inbounds, a lot of times we get minos and we’ll get whales. Without reach, we are focusing and targeting those segments of the universe that we serve looking for those whales and that’s all we’re working on so because we’re doing that, they’re pre-qualified for us. We know they were good fit, we have the research that we’ve done, we have the new tools that are out there in order to find the right people in those accounts and also that they are the right accounts. If we go in with that mindset that these are the people that we want as clients, then prospecting is used to get more of those new logos that are higher in lifetime value. It’s always going to be a channel that we want to explore if the ROI is there for us to put human involved in actually creating those opportunities. Joseph: One of the things–I think everybody that talks about calling these days, they talk about the voicemail or whether they leave a voicemail or what kind of a voicemail to leave because it’s a big part of what happens nowadays. What is your take on it? do you sometimes leave a voicemail, sometimes not? What kind of message do you leave? Marylou: Again, this is where the folks listening to this call have to have that mindset of testing because it’s a constantly roving target but what I’m settling now with clients is to book in voicemails so if we’re doing a sequence, that’s six or eight touch sequence, then the cadence which is the rhythm for phone with email is to leave voicemails on the book end, so the first and the last, and maybe some time in the middle to complement whatever emails we’re sending out and whatever intelligence we bleed so far because we’re bread crumbing the email content with clickthroughs so we’re kind of looking at the path that are prospect is traversing down in there buyer thought process and we’re engaging via voicemail with conversations relative to those emails so we’re adding value, we never say that we want something, we always frame it in why they should change, why now, why us. It’s a mini commercial just like what you see on tv that gets you sort of leaning in because something looks interesting or something makes you curious and you want to find out more. The voicemails also, there’s a psychology that if you’re again, targeting these whales and you leave a message saying that you’re also contacting Joe and Bob in the same similar departments regarding these initiatives then, there’s a little bit of social proof that you’ve done your homework and that you’re also talking with other people within the organization who are interested in what you have to offer. There’s an implied referral when you leave a voicemail. We do a little bit of a twist on that now. Joseph: I think it’s interesting because we talked about getting directed at people and we’ve talked about the old way of cold calling was to get past the gatekeeper and to the decision maker. Is that still relevant? Is that something that we’re still looking for or we’re doing our homework well enough that there’s not a lot of gatekeepers, we just get voicemail? Marylou: Well, we leverage the gatekeeper. Again, when we talk about those direct and indirect influencers in chapter three of that persona definition, what we’re doing in our calling campaigns now is we’re calling in and around that bull’s eye and engaging people who directly influence our target and indirectly influence our target and understanding further what initiatives they have in the corporation, where they’re headed, what the challenges are. We’re really trying to engage people in conversation throughout the organization especially if we’re going after those whales of which the gatekeeper is a part of. Joseph: I think I have one or a couple questions here left, is that–we talk about that persona and we talked about that, do we form a persona through our outbound efforts or are we constantly updating and moving towards the target, is that one of the goal sometimes of a campaign? Marylou: Yes, in fact–remember we talked about those assembly blocks and you’ve mentioned the SWAT 6 we do an ideal account profile which again, is focused on those high probable accounts that are going to close with higher close rate and also lifetime value and revenue target that’s high in value and then we work on the prospect personas within those targeted accounts with whom we’re going to have conversation we think we would have a conversation on top of funnel, where marketing may have 15 to 30 personas defined. We typically top of funnel will focus on the three that will get our toe in the door, our foot in the door, our follow-up meeting or an initial meeting that we can then determine if we’re a good fit for them and then move them further into the active pipeline towards qualification. It’s a little bit different but yes, we’re constantly fine tuning those personas and the reps are building those as a team once again so they internalize that person and as if they’re sending across from the table from them in an interview situation, they really know who their people are. Joseph: I kind of think–I get this idea that I got this somewhat funnel up there and these personas are changing as someone’s moving down personas, maybe the same person or different people but their situation and things are changing and moves as my prospect and my calling should adjust to it as they move, correct? Marylou: That’s correct. We’re at top of funnel, we think along the freeway where we have mile markers, there’re may be different people adding and flowing as we move to the next mile marker in this case the next stage of the active pipeline. We want to make a good guess as to who’s going to be wanting to at least start dialogue with us but that may change as we move through the active pipeline and we may need to define or re-define additional personas as the opportunity moves further and further down towards close. Joseph: This maybe out of your realm a little bit but I don’t think it is, listening to you. After the sale. We talk about re-selling especially in the SAAS world, retaining, renewing, and getting referrals, how important is it to have that outbound program in place for existing customers? Marylou: It’s extremely important. In fact, in building the persona definition, one of the inputs that we use if we can get it and MPS Gore which is net promoter which is a loyalty score which we’re trying to figure out how loyal our colleagues, our customers are and if they would refer colleagues, friends, family, whatever to us. Part of the outreach sequence that I teach my folks is to do a first in 10 which everyday, they’re going into their network as part of their workflow and they’re reaching out to 10 people in their network for the sole purpose of a referral into second level, third level, this will be like a LinkedIn type of program. Referral is part of outreach and while we can’t quantify it as much as we can a true outreach program which we can quantify right down to the penny, if we think about 10 contacts a day we’re reaching out, that’s 22 times 10 business days, that’s 220 additional contacts that we’re making from a referral standpoint times 12 months is additional 2,000 plus conversations that we’ve started for referral within our network alone. Joseph: Could you tell me a tool–we talked about cold emailing, we talked about what warm emailing and cold calling, warm calling and stuff like that, is there a particular tool that you introduced in your book that we may not have thought of that we should use in our outbound? Marylou: There are tools that are specifically set up for outreach or outbound. I think a couple we mentioned in the book would be like Yesware, outreach.io, Tout, SalesLoft. Now, I worked in Enterprise I’m higher up so there are probably more tools in the low, small, medium-sized business that are available off the Internet or cloud-based but those are the ones that are specifically geared towards outreach and cold/warming up the chill is what I call it rather than cold. But those are the tools that we use and what’s cool about those tools is we talked a little bit about the cadence and sequence and how does a business developer juggle all these contacts. Well, these tools actually you put in the recipe of what you want to do in terms of contacting and in the flow or sequence, or rhythm, the cadence and they remind the business developer what to do and when so that you don’t have to think about it, it serves it up for you. Joseph: How important is a process to a company these days in marketing? Marylou: Well, you’re speaking to an engineer who thinks process is the way of the world. Process is very important. You can’t get better if you can’t measure where you’re at. You just can’t. Winging it is not the answer. If you don’t have a process, get a process in. We have a process to find in the book, again, I said in the back of the book there’s a cheat sheet of putting a process in. It’s three to four steps and then think in those steps you want to have intra-metrics that will tell you within the step how you’re doing and then intermetrics which tell you how you’re doing from step to step to step. If you get that going then you’re going to lower your stress level number one because you can see improvement and it becomes a game almost of trying to eek out that additional percentage improvement. Joseph: I think those are great words of advice. The other thing I guess what I took from the book is where that big picture. If I could narrow it down to two things or three things is one, to have a process in place, that’s one reason. Also, is to do your homework before you make the phone call and I think most people will expect that. The big thing and the most simplest thing is making sure that prospect is part of your everyday work. Marylou: Right, habit. Habit, habit, habit. Habit trumps inspiration, people. Get into a habit. I even have a habit for my daily rhythm at home. I have my little block time. I’ve already set up when I’m going to walk the dogs, when I’m going to exercise. It’s not strict in any way, it’s just in blocks and I just try to get the blocks done before I end my day. Joseph: I think that’s awesome advice Marylou. Tell me, what’s upcoming for you and how someone can contact you and learn more about your company the Strategic Pipeline? Marylou: Oh, okay. You can reach me on LinkedIn, Marylou Tyler. That’s a good way to get a hold me and connect me that way. Twitter is @maryloutyler and the book that we’re discussing is called Predictable Prospecting. It’s available on Amazon and it’s published by McGraw Hill so it should be ubiquitous in stores around. Joseph: Marylou, Marylou, would you start over that because the first time the Internet broke up, perfect and it broke up twice just as you were giving where to find you. Marylou: Oh gosh. Okay. Joseph: Okay, but you’re good now but I’d like for you to just start over so I’ll cut that part out, okay? Do you want me to ask a question again or are you ready? Marylou: I’ll just begin, just give me a second. Joseph: Okay, alright. Marylou: The best place to reach me is on LinkedIn, just do a search on Marylou Tyler. I’m also on Twitter @maryloutyler and the book is called Predictable Prospecting, it’s available on Amazon published by McGraw Hill which means it’s probably in your local bookstore somewhere if not, ask for it and then, Strategic Pipeline is our website, there is a place where you can leave me a voicemail on Strategic Pipeline. If you have any question, I’m happy to answer it. Joseph: Well, that’s awesome. I like to thank you very much Marylou. It was a fun book okay, it was a great book, easy read and like I said, I love the systematic approach of Predictable Prospecting, and I encourage everyone to get it. Thank you again, this podcast will be available on business title on iTunes store and business title on blog site so thanks everyone for listening.